Response: Intentions and Revisions

"The problem in teaching writing is that writing is never abstract and rules always are" (49). 

In "Intentions and Revisions", Nancy Sommers discusses the issues that student experience in writing as they try to follow a certain mold (usually the five-paragraph essay) and follow a set of rules they believe will lead them to write the "perfect" essay. Students tend not to develop their ideas in their writing but fixate on the grammatical and structural rules they think they need to follow. I agree with Sommers that revision is key to writing development but revision is, as she refers to it, recursive. Revision occurs throughout all the stages of writing, it's not part of the writing process that exclusively belongs at the end. From what I've seen as instructor at the YMCA,  students do not think they are capable of revising their essays. They look to the teacher to make all the corrections necessary, which takes away from their writing because they have control over the meaning of their essays yet they look to someone else to make it "right" or "better". Meaning is lost to rules, and rules are seen by many students as clearly defining"right" and "wrong" in essay writing. Also, as I read the examples of the two different models of writing an essay, I tended to identify more with Rita and her need to establish a thesis statement before continuing the rest of the essay. The thesis can be one of the most challenging parts of writing an essay and that is because many of us believe that the thesis guides our essay, but as we see in these examples, there isn't a thesis without a body. As we write, our ideas change, which means our thesis changes along with it, not the other way around.